Shell Programming and Scripting

Is it possible to delete the last line in a file usin awk or perl?

May be. But why try to write a awk or perl program when you already have utilities for that? Is this homework?

Not home work. Requirement in my work.
I could do it using some other utilities. I heard awk is much powelful utility for file processing. Thought it would improve runtime performance.

I tried 2 possibilities

Using Sed :
lastLine=`wc -l <filename> | awk '{ print $1 }'`
sed -e "`echo $lastLine`d" <filename>

Using head :
lastLine=`wc -l <filename> | awk '{ print $1 }'`
head -`echo "$lineNo - 1" | bc` <filename>
Sed version was better in terms of time of execution.
Any better way to do this?

Regards,
----------
Suman

remove last line:

Code:

 sed '$d' filename > newfile

Thank You. It works